Building a new science of consciousness

Slightly delayed round-up this month; a lot going on. Notable content releases: Romeo wrote a fantastic piece on “Why do contemplative practitioners make so many metaphysical claims?” Here are the first and last paragraphs: To paraphrase Culadasa: awakening is a set of special insights that lead to drastically reduced suffering.…

Three major pieces of content this month, two of them meditation-related- Andrés lays out a detailed theory of phenomenological time in The Pseudo-Time Arrow: Explaining Phenomenal Time With Implicit Causal Structures In Networks Of Local Binding: What is time? When people ask this question it is often hard to tell what…

Some things going on in and around QRI: One of the best ways to understand a new intellectual approach is to study which existing lineages it ties together. Here’s a provisional list of the lineages behind our research. Andrés shared his vision for Psychedelic Turk: a Platform for People on Altered…

Some news and accomplishments from the last month: Invited talk: I (Mike) gave a talk on “The Future of Neuroscience” in Moscow, Russia; the basic theme was a light introduction for non-specialists to some of the most interesting current threads in neuroscience. Slides (English) and video (English+Russian). Podcast: The Waking…

A brief work/links update: A future for neuroscience is finally up; if you’ve found yourself wondering, “how does QRI even begin to connect what we can measure about the brain to what’s happening in the mind?” this writeup would be a good place to start. Last week, my colleague Andrés was at…

The following are the presentations QRI gave at The Science of Consciousness in Tucson last week: Michael Edward Johnson introducing some of the philosophical methods QRI uses to study qualia: Part I talks about what it means to ‘solve’ consciousness; Part II talks about how to go about interpreting the…

My colleague Andrés Gómez Emilsson and I will be at TSC2018 in Tucson next week– please feel welcome to say hello! I’ll be speaking on the foundational underpinnings of qualia– what it means to ‘solve’ consciousness, some heuristics for interpreting the output of theories like IIT, and introducing the Symmetry…

David Chalmers has had an enormous impact on how philosophy deals with the mind. He famously coined the distinction between the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness, or how the brain works, and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, or why we’re conscious at all. In reality, lots of the problems Chalmers tags…

Here’s Daniel Dennett (in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) explaining how deeply transformative the idea of evolution was at the time: Did you ever hear of universal acid? This fantasy used to amuse me and some of my schoolboy friends—I have no idea whether we invented or inherited it, along with Spanish…